Startup founders who speak bring something most other business speakers cannot: firsthand accounts of building under uncertainty, without resources, and usually without a roadmap. The women on this list have done exactly that. They have founded or co-founded companies across sectors including beauty, healthcare, wellness, women's finance, agriculture technology, and sales training. Several have scaled to significant market presence; a few have led their companies to public listings. All of them speak from direct operational experience rather than observation or theory. The Indian startup ecosystem has produced a growing number of women founders in the last decade, but they remain underrepresented on conference stages relative to their male counterparts. This list is a practical corrective. It names women who are available to speak about fundraising, product development, team building, scaling strategy, and the specific dynamics of building a company in India. The conversations they lead tend to be grounded in specifics rather than generalities, which makes them more useful to an audience of founders, investors, and professionals thinking about making the entrepreneurial transition.
1. Vineeta Singh
CEO and Co-founder, SUGAR Cosmetics
Vineeta Singh is the CEO and co-founder of SUGAR Cosmetics, a direct-to-consumer beauty brand she built into one of India's fastest-growing cosmetics companies before expanding into international markets. She turned down a high-paying financial services offer immediately after business school to pursue entrepreneurship, a decision that has since become a frequently cited example of the career risk calculus for high-potential Indian graduates. SUGAR Cosmetics was built on the thesis that mainstream cosmetics brands were not formulated for Indian skin tones and textures, and that building specifically for Indian consumers was both a business opportunity and a design imperative. She speaks on direct-to-consumer brand building, the Indian beauty market, fundraising and investor relations, product-led growth, building a founder-led brand, and the dynamics of scaling a consumer company in India.
Connect with her on LinkedIn.
2. Ghazal Alagh
Co-founder, Honasa Consumer (Mamaearth)
Ghazal Alagh co-founded Honasa Consumer, the parent company of Mamaearth, India's first direct-to-consumer unicorn in the beauty and personal care space. Mamaearth was built around a specific proposition: safe-for-baby, toxin-free personal care products for an Indian market that was, at the time of founding, largely served by legacy multinational brands. Honasa subsequently listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange. As a founder, she navigated the experience of building a consumer brand while managing young children, which has made her a direct and specific voice on the intersection of entrepreneurship and motherhood. She speaks on D2C brand building, scaling a startup to unicorn status, building a product company in a crowded consumer market, the dynamics of going public as a founder, and what building a company with a co-founder and life partner looks like in practice.
Connect with her on LinkedIn.
3. Falguni Nayar
Founder and CEO, Nykaa
Falguni Nayar founded Nykaa in 2012 at the age of 49, leaving a long career in investment banking at Kotak Mahindra Capital Company to build what became India's first listed unicorn with a woman founder at the helm. Nykaa is a multi-category beauty and wellness platform that built its own distribution and fulfilment infrastructure, and its 2021 IPO was one of the most prominent listings in the Indian startup ecosystem's recent history. She is a direct counterexample to the assumption that entrepreneurship has an age ceiling or requires a background in technology. She speaks on entrepreneurship, the beauty and D2C market in India, investing and capital markets, building a company with a long-term orientation rather than a short-term exit mentality, and what it means to start a company in your late forties with knowledge that younger founders do not yet have.
Connect with her on LinkedIn.
4. Namita Thapar
Executive Director, Emcure Pharmaceuticals
Namita Thapar is Executive Director of Emcure Pharmaceuticals, a major Indian pharmaceutical company, where she has led key strategic and operational changes since rejoining the business after her MBA in the United States. She gained significant public recognition through Shark Tank India, where her direct, analytical approach to evaluating startups and founders made her one of the programme's most followed investors. Her speaking work covers entrepreneurship and startup investing, the Indian pharmaceutical and healthcare sector, building within family-business structures, what institutional investors actually evaluate when they assess early-stage companies, and the gap between what founders present and what their businesses actually require. She speaks candidly about the process of earning authority within a family enterprise, which makes her particularly credible with audiences navigating similar contexts.
Connect with her on LinkedIn.
5. Swati Piramal
Vice Chairperson, Piramal Group
Swati Piramal serves as Vice Chairperson of Piramal Group, one of India's largest diversified conglomerates, with interests spanning pharmaceuticals, real estate, and financial services. She is a trained medical professional with advanced degrees in management, giving her a rare combination of clinical and commercial expertise. She was instrumental in building and transforming the group's pharmaceutical division into a globally significant generics and API manufacturer. Her speaking work covers building within a family business at scale, the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry in India, women in science and medicine, corporate governance, and social investment. She speaks with particular knowledge of the healthcare ecosystem, the R&D dynamics of the pharmaceutical sector in India, and the governance challenges of managing a diversified conglomerate across multiple business cycles.
Connect with her on LinkedIn.
6. Sairee Chahal
Founder and CEO, SHEROES
Sairee Chahal founded SHEROES, a women-only community and professional platform that has grown to over 30 million members, and Mahila Money, a lending platform for women entrepreneurs in India. She has been building companies in the women-and-work space for over a decade, and her perspective as a founder is shaped by years of practical experience: building products, raising capital, managing teams, and scaling a business whose existence depends on proving that women-focused platforms are commercially serious. She speaks on the economics of women's participation in the workforce, the specific gaps in how India's digital economy has been designed for women, fundraising from investors with gender-lens mandates, and what it takes to sustain a large community-based platform across a decade of disruption. Her talks are data-informed, operationally grounded, and direct about what has and has not worked.
Connect with her on LinkedIn.
7. Aditi Gupta
Co-founder, Menstrupedia
Aditi Gupta co-founded Menstrupedia, a Bengaluru-based social enterprise that produces menstrual health education materials in comic-book format, distributed across India and in multiple languages internationally. The company addresses a specific and persistent gap: the absence of accurate, accessible, shame-free information about menstruation for adolescents and their families, particularly in communities where formal reproductive health education is limited or absent. She built Menstrupedia as both a mission-driven company and a commercially self-sustaining one, which required navigating the unusual challenge of marketing and selling a product that most brands, publishers, and distributors prefer not to acknowledge. Her speaking work as a startup founder covers social entrepreneurship, building a viable company around a taboo subject, scaling impact through accessible media design, gender and public health communication, and the fundraising dynamics specific to social enterprises in India.
Connect with her on LinkedIn.
8. Nidhi Pant
Co-founder, S4S Technologies
Nidhi Pant co-founded S4S Technologies, a Pune-based social enterprise that deploys solar dehydration technology to help women farmers and agri-entrepreneurs in rural Maharashtra process vegetables and agricultural produce with extended shelf life, reducing post-harvest losses and creating new income streams. S4S has built a supply chain connecting rural women-led processing units to urban institutional buyers and export markets, and has been recognised by government agencies and international development organisations for its impact model. Her speaking work covers agri-tech entrepreneurship, economic empowerment for women in rural India, applied solar technology in the agricultural sector, building scalable supply chains for small farming communities, and the experience of operating a deep-tech social enterprise in a sector that receives limited formal capital.
Connect with her on LinkedIn.
9. Chitra Singh
Founder, Sales Womentoring
Chitra Singh is the founder of Sales Womentoring, a community and coaching platform focused on sales capability building specifically for women. Sales is a field where women are underrepresented in senior roles despite being well-represented in account management and customer-facing roles at junior and mid levels, and Chitra's work addresses that specific gap: helping women in sales develop the skills, networks, and visibility that lead to senior sales leadership positions. Her speaking topics include women in sales, building a professional community, sales leadership and career growth for women, business development strategy, and the structural dynamics of how sales organisations evaluate and promote talent. She brings firsthand experience of the sales profession and a specific focus on the communities and training structures that have helped women advance within it.
Connect with her on LinkedIn.
10. Aarti Gill
Co-founder and CEO, OZiva
Aarti Gill co-founded OZiva, a plant-based nutrition and wellness brand that has become one of India's fastest-growing consumer health companies. OZiva was built on the premise that effective nutritional supplements do not have to rely on synthetic ingredients, and that Indian consumers, particularly women, were underserved by a market dominated by products designed for bodybuilding rather than holistic health. The company has raised significant venture capital and expanded its product range substantially. She speaks on entrepreneurship in the consumer health and wellness space, D2C brand building, fundraising, building a science-backed product company, scaling a startup in a regulatory environment, and what it takes to educate a market while simultaneously selling to it. She also speaks on women's health as a distinct product and business category.
Connect with her on LinkedIn.
About Draupadi on the Dais
Draupadi on the Dais exists in part because founder stories from women are systematically underrepresented on the panels and stages where entrepreneurship is discussed. The speakers listed here have built companies, navigated funding rounds, managed teams, and made the decisions that define what a startup actually is at the operational level. Their insights are not borrowed from case studies; they are the case studies. Every speaker on the Dais is individually verified. No profile goes live without a confirmed professional record. If you are running an entrepreneurship event, a founder programme, a startup ecosystem conference, or an investment summit, the women on this list can bring a kind of credibility that changes what a panel is capable of.
Browse the full Women Startup Founders Who Speak roster on Draupadi on the Dais.